The Supreme Court yesterday heard arguments in the on-going battle surrounding a 2005 California law seeking to ban the sale of violent video games to minors. The court appears to be decidedly split on the topic, with Justices on both sides of the political divide questioning the First Amendment implications of such a ban.
Lawyers arguing in favor of the law suggested that failure to uphold it would constitute arbitrary regulation of content. “California is no less concerned with a minor’s access to the deviant level of violence that is presented in a certain category of video games,” Zackery Morazzini, a deputy state attorney general told the court.
Justices questioned whether such a ban wasn’t a slippery slope of censorship. “What about films? What about comic books? Why are video games special?” Justice Ginsberg asked the lawyers.
The Entertainment Merchants Association agreed with Ginsberg’s concern

The California statute…is the latest in a long history of overreactions to new expressive media. In the past, comic books, true-crime novels, movies, rock music, and other new media have all been accused of harming our youth. In each case, the perceived threat later proved unfounded. Video games are no different.

Justice Scalia suggested that such a precedent might lead to further content regulation of the video game industry, “What’s next after violence? Drinking? Smoking?”
Is it absurd to suggest that video games should have the same First amendment protections as the written world? After all, there wasn’t much in the way of video game offerings back when the amendment was penned. Justice Alito argued that the framers “cannot possibly have been envisioned at the time when the First Amendment was ratified.”
True enough, I suppose, but then such a comment could certainly be extended to comic books, movies, video games, cartoons, and countless other modern conveniences–after all, they really didn’t have much in the way of entertainment back in the late 18th century.
Justice Sotomayor, invoked the Looney Tunes defense, stating that one study, “says that the effect of violence is the same for a Bugs Bunny episode as it is for a violent video [game].”
Another pop cultural highlight occurred when rookie court member Justice Kagan name-checked Moral Kombat, stating that the title, “is an iconic game which I am sure half of the clerks who work for us spent considerable amounts of time in their adolescence playing.”